Michael Ignatieff's family: refugees, or the tyrants who caused refugees?

Michael Ignatieff said something incredible outside Parliament today. He was talking about a bill to reform refugee laws in Canada. But he just couldn't help himself: he had to make it about him, because that's much more interesting. So he actually said "you're looking at a guy whose dad was a political refugee". Here's the clip:

Is everything really about him? Is a subject only interesting by virtue of having a personal connection to his eminence?

But far more interesting than his psychological quirks is the actual substance of what he said: that his father was a political refugee.

It might be technically accurate to call a wealthy aristocratic Russian family of czarist cabinet ministers who went into political exile after the revolution, and landed very, very softly in Canada, "political refugees". And the Ignatieffs did have to leave their immovable assets behind, like country dachas, and maybe even some jewelry too. But as Ignatieff wrote in his book The Russian Album at page 11, if Ignatieff's father regarded himself as a refugee, the Soviets didn't:

"The Soviet officials, led by Nikita Khrushchev himself, called my father Graf (Count) and took him aside and asked in all sincerity why he didn't come home again and continue the diplomatic work of his grandfather instead of serving the diplomacy of a satellite state of the Americans."

What a victim! Seriously: Michael Ignatieff compares that experience to that of real refugees to Canada in 2010 -- victims of ethnic cleansing, police brutality, etc.

But that's just half of it. Ignatieff is clearly trading on his family's moral authority by virtue of being refugees. But that's probably a subject he should avoid. Ignatieff's own great-grandfather, Count Nicholas Ignatieff (pictured at left), was a leading cause of Russian refugees: as a minister in the czar's cabinet, Ignatieff's great-grandfather implemented the "May Laws", anti-Semitic Russian statutes eerily similar to Hitler's Nuremberg Laws written a few decades later. Here's a quote from The Russian Album, pages 58-59:

In 1882 he [Nicholas Ignatieff, Minister of the Interior] signed new legislation forbidding Jews to move into the countryside outside of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, to acquire land, to trade in alcohol. or to open their shops on Sundays...

When the Jewish leaders asked why they were not entitled to the same protection by the police as other Russian subjects, Ignatieff replied that they were not like other Russian subjects...

Throughout the Southern Ukraine and Bessarabia, Jewish shops were smashed and burned and crowds carrying icons, often led by priests, were allowed to rampage through the Jewish quarters of the towns beating and cursing, looting and burning. Delegations of Jewish leaders came to see Ignatieff at the Ministry of the Interior. They told him they were in bondage as under Pharaoh. 'So when is your Exodus, and where is your Moses,' he is supposed to have said in reply.  The Western borders of the Empire were open he insisted - If they wanted to leave for their promised land he would not stop them.  And they did by the hundreds of thousands over the next decade, streaming across Europe to the boats which took them to Ellis Island or Palestine.

One of those refugees was my own great-grandfather, who fled Ignatieff's anti-Semitic dictatorship and moved to Edmonton, Alberta in 1903.

Of course, I don't hold Michael Ignatieff responsible for the anti-Jewish decrees enforced by his own great-grandfather, or the vicious pogroms carried out under his great-grandfather's reign. Of course not.

But if my great-grandfather had been an abusive tyrant under czarist Russia, who caused hundreds of thousands of Jews and others to flee as refugees, I'm not so sure I'd go on national TV and claim victimhood status as a son of refugees myself.